Sunday, July 16, 2017

Does Minsk’s Call for Creation of Popular Militia Presage Pro-Russian Separatism in Belarus?

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 16 – Given that
Belarus now has seven times as many police per 100,000 residents as it did in
Soviet times, Natalya Radina says, it is far from clear why Interior Minister
Igor Shunevich has called for creating a new popular militia to help the
militia fight crime. Indeed, his words provoke concern such a force may be used
for an entirely different purpose.

The chief editor of the opposition
Charter 97 portal says that one possibility is that these forces will be used
not to defend Belarusians from crime but to spark pro-Moscow separatism much as
such organizations were used by Russian forces in the early days of Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine’s Donbass (charter97.org/ru/news/2017/7/15/256413/).

According to the Ukrainian security
official, “under the form of ‘people’s militias,’ Russia activated its network
of agents in eastern Ukraine at least as early as January 2014, a month before
the victory of the EuroMaidan, the flight of president Viktor Yanukovich, and
the invasion of Crimea.”

“Already on January 27, 2014,”
Petrulevich says, a special session of the Luhansk oblast Soviet occurred at
which was adopted a decision about the creation of so-called people’s militias,
the formation of which was assigned to the local administration of the MVD and the
SBU.” That means, he continues, that Russia “activated its ‘sleepers’ in the east
of Ukraine” exactly then.

The Ukrainian security officer stresses,
Radina says, that “Eldar Nadriashvili, an advisor to the head of the Luhansk
oblast administration worked on the formation of the militias” and then later
went over to the side of the militants of ‘the LNR.’” These units stored the
Luhansk SBU headquarters when Russian forces intervened.

And Petrulevich says that precisely
these “’people’s militias’” became the first “’armed forces of the LNR.’”

It is worth noting, the Belarusian
editor continues, that “the Belarusian interior minister is a native of Luhansk
oblast and clearly monitors local pro-Russian separatists” in his new
country.But what is especially “strange,”
she says, is that this initiative has surfaced just before the Zapad-2017
exercises that will bring massive numbers of Russian troops into the country.

And it is likely that the first to
be included in such “people’s militias” will be “members of pro-Russian
militarized organizations which have grown under the patronage of the Russian
Orthodox church, ‘the Cossacks,’ and various military-sports clubs.”They could easily be ordered to so something other
than fight crime.

The risk of that is especially great
given that the author of this proposal is someone who “frequently has sent
signals to Moscow” that he is on its side, Radina argues; and thus it is worth reflecting
about this danger given that “as the Ukrainian case has shown, from ‘popular
militias’ to pro-Russian separatism is a single step.”